Take the ‘wild wall’ path into rugged wonderland
you can take a bus to some of the most-visited Great Wall sites, and there’s even a train to Badaling today, I didn’t want to fuss with transportation and directions on my short trip in November 2015.
I booked a day trip through China Hiking, a Beijing company that includes transportation from the city, lunch and a guided hike.
A couple of days before my flight, I looked up the weather for Beijing: Snowflakes dotted the forecast map. China Hiking assured me by email that the trip was still a go.
When I arrived in Beijing two nights later, the storm’s first snow was falling.
The designated meeting point the next morning was at the exit for Beijing’s Lama Temple subway station. As promised, guide John He was waiting. He glanced at my shoes while welcoming me and then introduced three other hikers: an Australian woman on holiday and two businessmen from France and the Netherlands taking a day away from their work trip.
“After lunch, we’ll start walking,” John said, as our driver pulled onto the busy road. “Normally, the hike takes 3 1⁄2 hours, but we’ll see.”
He noted that he had checked in with the owner of the farmhouse where we were to have lunch. “He said it’s snowing, but no wind. We’ll have fun.”
The trip out of Beijing was a slog through slush and traffic, but within an hour we had entered the countryside. Soon after we were winding through a tranquil valley and up a driveway to a simple farmhouse surrounded by bare walnut trees.
For lunch, cooks from the kitchen loaded the ubiquitous Lazy Susan with plates of steaming mushrooms, cabbage, chicken, an omelet — all hearty and filling.
By the end of our meal just before noon, snow had stuck and could be counted in inches.
The gentle flurry showed no sign of abating.
The trailhead was a couple of minutes down the road, just around the bend in a narrow canyon, but the wall was nowhere to be seen through the fog and snow.
John opened the rear of the van to pull out gear for our hike. Each of us received walking poles and a pair of lightweight rubber crampons that could be pulled over the soles of our shoes for extra tread.
“What we’re going to see today is a real piece of history, not something for tourists,” John said, adding that although this section of the wall, Jiankou, was among the best preserved, it was still about 500 years old.
Built over centuries
The first sections of China’s Great Wall were built in the 5th century BC, but that was only the first of three distinct building phases, each with its own architectural style, he explained.
Much of the wall in western China was built of mud bricks. Successive dynasties extended and reinforced the wall, particularly after the rise of Genghis Khan, who successfully invaded Beijing from the north 800 years ago.
“This Ming Dynasty wall was the last to be built,” John said. “After that, there was no more need.”
Many sections of the wall have become dust; recent calculations estimate the combined length of the various fragments and spurs at 13,114 miles.
The hiking was steep at first, through scrub and brush, but after about 15 minutes John stopped us and pointed.
Across the canyon, fewer than 1,000 feet away, fallen snow outlined a squiggly black line inching down the face of a mountain and then up the flanks of the hillAlthough
Where soldiers waited
With more scrambling we came to the first watchtower. A short staircase climbed to the top of the wall, and I ran my hands along the cold brick as if to confirm it was real.
Besides being surprisingly steep, hiking along the top of the wall was more rugged than I imagined. The structure was actually two parallel brick walls, 24 feet tall and about 18 feet apart. In between was dirt and rock, capped with a layer of brick on which to walk.
Small trees had emerged along much of the ramparts, degrading the walkway. Even where the “roof ” of the wall was intact, it was often so precipitous that slipping was a near-constant peril.
In some sections, parts of the outer wall had crumbled, requiring us to walk along paths only a foot or two wide, with one side dropping to the base of the wall and then down a steep mountain to terrain veiled by the clouds.
For the most part the walk on the snowy wall was magical and would be difficult to re-create. Not one footprint lay in our path, and the mounding snow absorbed all sounds, creating utter silence.
The towers, every quarter-mile or so, were chilly, forlorn havens — a guardroom below capped by an observation platform from which trees sprouted. It was hard to imagine the life of soldiers living here.
There was one thing I was missing: With the snow and cloud cover obscuring vistas beyond a couple of hundred feet, I could only imagine the picture-postcard panorama of the Great Wall snaking over the hills into the distance.
No sooner were we trudging down the hillside back to the van than I was planning a return trip.